Time to start the Trick of the Week again! Each week, a trick will be picked (hopefully by general consensus), you can post your progress and final videos in this thread. If your dog already knows the trick, try to make it more complicated or work on a specific part of the trick. For example, the first week's trick is Sit Up. If your dog already knows this, work on duration, sit up on a moveable object like an exercise ball or cuing from a distance. If your dog is unable to physically do a trick, feel free to modify as you see fit. Taking sit up for example again, you can teach the dog to sit with their paws on a chair or table for support.

I started with Payton using the frisbee target - put it on my hand and he put one paw, then both paws on the target. Slowly raised my hand. The plan was to keep lifting my hand until we got to a "sit pretty," then start taking my hand away and ask for a maintained position.

Then I cheated and lured Auggie (because he kept whacking me frantically and it hurt) and Payton started doing it because he saw Auggie do it. =P So I have no idea if my plan would have worked. Maybe somebody else will try it that way or can use that to build off?

I think I'm going to try and teach it to Didgie again since I never perfected it or put a cue to it or any real duration and try to up it a bit with Traveler. Maybe make it into a down, sit up, stand up on the hind legs and back down into the sit up.

Bandit is so clumsy I am going to modify this one for him. He will be falling over onto his head and that wont be so cute.

When we first learned this in a tricks class, the instructor told me that it's harder for big dogs to learn. She had people with bigger dogs stand behind them bracing their back with your knees/legs. Essentially you're spotting them so that they can't fall backwards. Then just lure them straight up with a treat. Once they get what you want them to do and the hang of balancing, you can assist less and less and move around to the front.

I'm going to stick with Squash on this one. He knows it, but doesn't hold it very long and I'd like to work on duration. Here's where we're starting out from (with stealth Maisy down-stay practice in the background, lol):